Submitted by Scenic Bluffs Community Health Centers
For more than 50 years, Community Health Centers have delivered affordable, accessible, quality and cost-effective primary healthcare to patients regardless of their ability to pay. Health Centers have become an essential primary care provider for America’s most vulnerable populations, including the Medicaid and uninsured. Health Centers advance a model of coordinated, comprehensive, and patient-centered care, coordinating a wide range of medical, dental, behavioral, and patient services. They also deliver crucial services such as case management, transportation, and health education.
Community Health Centers, such as Scenic Bluffs, serve more than 25 million people each year, a number that continues to grow along with the demand for affordable primary care. Having a strong primary care system is critical to improving health outcomes, reducing unnecessary hospitalizations and emergency department visits, and lowering costs.
Health Centers have compiled a significant record of success that includes:
• Producing $24 billion in annual health system savings
• Reducing unnecessary hospitalizations and unnecessary visits to the emergency room;
• Treating patients for a fraction of the average cost of one emergency room visit;
• Maintaining patient satisfaction levels of nearly 100 percent;
• Serving more than one in six Medicaid beneficiaries for less than two percent of the national Medicaid budget.
Health Centers not only prevent illness and foster wellness in the most challenging populations; we produce innovative solutions to pressing healthcare issues. We reach beyond the walls of traditional primary care to address factors that may cause sickness, such as lack of nutrition, mental illness, homelessness and opioid addiction. Because of our long record of success in innovation, managing healthcare costs, and reducing chronic disease, we have a proud tradition of bipartisan support in Congress.
